No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my
brother's, and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth,
which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of
the Immortal Gods. One half of time indeed is flown--the other half
remains in store for us with all its countless treasures; for there is
no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes. We make
the coming age our own.----
"The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us."
Death, old age, are words without a meaning, that pass by us like the
idle air which we regard not. Others may have undergone, or may still
be liable to them--we "bear a charmed life," which laughs to scorn all
such sickly fancies. As in setting out on a delightful journey, we
strain our eager gaze forward--
"Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail,"--
and see no end to the landscape, new objects presenting themselves as
we advance; so, in the commencement of life, we set no bounds to our
inclinations, nor to the unrestricted opportunities of gratifying
them. We have as yet found no obstacle, no disposition to flag; and it
seems that we can go on so for ever. We look round in a new world,
full of life, and motion, and ceaseless progress; and feel in
ourselves all the vigour and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not
foresee from any present symptoms how we shall be left behind in the
natural course of things, decline into old age, and drop into the
grave. It is the simplicity, and as it were _abstractedness_ of our
feelings in youth, that (so to speak) identifies us with nature, and
(our experience being slight and our passions strong) deludes us into
a belief of being immortal like it. Our short-lived connection with
existence, we fondly flatter ourselves, is an indissoluble and lasting
union--a honey-moon that knows neither coldness, jar, nor separation.
As infants smile and sleep, we are rocked in the cradle of our wayward
fancies, and lulled into security by the roar of the universe around
us--we quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it,
instead of which it only overflows the more--objects press around us,
filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires
that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of
death. From that plenitude of our being, we cannot change all at once
to dust and ashes, we cannot imagine "this sensible, warm motion, to
become a kneaded clod"--we are too much dazzled by the brightness of
the waking dream around us to look into the darkness of the tomb. We
no more see our end than our beginning: the one is lost in oblivion
and vacancy, as the other is hid from us by the crowd and hurry of
approaching events. Or the grim shadow is seen lingering in the
horizon, which we are doomed never to overtake, or whose last, faint,
glimmering outline touches upon Heaven and translates us to the skies!
Nor would the hold that life has taken of us permit us to detach our
thoughts from present objects and pursuits, even if we would. What is
there more opposed to health, than sickness; to strength and beauty,
than decay and dissolution; to the active search of knowledge than
mere oblivion? Or is there none of the usual advantage to bar the
approach of Death, and mock his idle threats; Hope supplies their
place, and draws a veil over the abrupt termination of all our
cherished schemes. While the spirit of youth remains unimpaired, ere
the "wine of life is drank up," we are like people intoxicated or in a
fever, who are hurried away by the violence of their own sensations:
it is only as present objects begin to pall upon the sense, as we have
been disappointed in our favourite pursuits, cut off from our closest
ties, that passion loosens its hold upon the breast, that we by
degrees become weaned from the world, and allow ourselves to
contemplate, "as in a glass, darkly," the possibility of parting with
it for good. The example of others, the voice of experience, has no
effect upon us whatever. Casualties we must avoid: the slow and
deliberate advances of age we can play at _hide-and-seek_ with. We
think ourselves too lusty and too nimble for that blear-eyed decrepid
old gentleman to catch us. Like the foolish fat scullion, in Sterne,
when she hears that Master Bobby is dead, our only reflection is--"So
am not I!" The idea of death, instead of staggering our confidence,
rather seems to strengthen and enhance our possession and our
enjoyment of life. Others may fall around us like leaves, or be mowed
down like flowers by the scythe of Time: these are but tropes and
figures to the unreflecting ears and overweening presumption of youth.
It is not till we see the flowers of Love, Hope, and Joy, withering
around us, and our own pleasures cut up by the roots, that we bring
the moral home to ourselves, that we abate something of the wanton
extravagance of our pretensions, or that the emptiness and dreariness
of the prospect before us reconciles us to the stillness of the grave!
"Life! thou strange thing, that hast a power to feel
Thou art, and to perceive that others are."[39]
[Footnote 39: Fawcett's Art of War, a poem, 1794.]
Well might the poet begin his indignant invective against an art,
whose professed object is its destruction, with this animated
apostrophe to life. Life is indeed a strange gift, and its privileges
are most miraculous. Nor is it singular that when the splendid boon is
first granted us, our gratitude, our admiration, and our delight
should prevent us from reflecting on our own nothingness, or from
thinking it will ever be recalled. Our first and strongest impressions
are taken from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and we very
innocently transfer its durability as well as magnificence to
ourselves. So newly found, we cannot make up our minds to parting with
it yet and at least put off that consideration to an indefinite term.
Like a clown at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have
no thoughts of going home, or that it will soon be night. We know our
existence only for external objects, and we measure it by them. We can
never be satisfied with gazing; and nature will still want us to look
on and applaud. Otherwise, the sumptuous entertainment, "the feast of
reason and the flow of soul," to which they were invited, seems little
better than a mockery and a cruel insult. We do not go from a play
till the scene is ended, and the lights are ready to be extinguished.
But the fair face of things still shines on; shall we be called away,
before the curtain falls, or ere we have scarce had a glimpse of what
is going on? Like children, our stepmother Nature holds us up to see
the raree-show of the universe; and then, as if life were a burthen to
support, lets us instantly down again. Yet in that short interval,
what "brave sublunary things" does not the spectacle unfold; like a
bubble, at one minute reflecting the universe, and the next, shook to
air!--To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean,
to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures,
to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery vales, to see
the world spread out under one's finger in a map, to bring the stars
near, to view the smallest insects in a microscope, to read history,
and witness the revolutions of empires and the succession of
generations, to hear of the glory of Sidon and Tyre, of Babylon and
Susa, as of a faded pageant, and to say all these were, and are now
nothing, to think that we exist in such a point of time, and in such a
corner of space, to be at once spectators and a part of the moving
scene, to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to
hear
----"The stockdove plain amid the forest deep,
That drowsy rustles to the sighing gale"----
to traverse desert wildernesses, to listen to the midnight choir, to
visit lighted halls, or plunge into the dungeon's gloom, or sit in
crowded theatres and see life itself mocked, to feel heat and cold,
pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, to study the
works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame
and to dream of immortality, to have read Shakspeare and belong to the
same species as Sir Isaac Newton;[40] to be and to do all this, and
then in a moment to be nothing, to have it all snatched from one like
a juggler's ball or a phantasmagoria; there is something revolting and
incredible to sense in the transition, and no wonder that, aided by
youth and warm blood, and the flush of enthusiasm, the mind contrives
for a long time to reject it with disdain and loathing as a monstrous
and improbable fiction, like a monkey on a house-top, that is loath,
amidst its fine discoveries and specious antics, to be tumbled
head-long into the street, and crushed to atoms, the sport and
laughter of the multitude!
[Footnote 40: Lady Wortley Montagu says, in one of her letters, that
"she would much rather be a rich _effendi_, with all his ignorance,
than Sir Isaac Newton, with all his knowledge." This was not perhaps
an impolitic choice, as she had a better chance of becoming one than
the other, there being many rich effendis to one Sir Isaac Newton. The
wish was not a very intellectual one. The same petulance of rank and
sex breaks out everywhere in these "_Letters_". She is constantly
reducing the poets or philosophers who have the misfortune of her
acquaintance, to the figure they might make at her Ladyship's levee or
toilette, not considering that the public mind does not sympathize
with this process of a fastidious imagination. In the same spirit, she
declares of Pope and Swift, that "had it not been for the
_good-nature_ of mankind, these two superior beings were entitled, by
their birth and hereditary fortune, to be only a couple of link-boys."
Gulliver's Travels, and the Rape of the Lock, go for nothing in this
critical estimate, and the world raised the authors to the rank of
superior beings, in spite of their disadvantages of birth and fortune,
_out of pure good-nature_! So, again, she says of Richardson, that he
had never got beyond the servants' hall, and was utterly unfit to
describe the manners of people of quality; till, in the capricious
workings of her vanity, she persuades herself that Clarissa is very
like what she was at her age, and that Sir Thomas and Lady Grandison
strongly resembled what she had heard of her mother and remembered of
her father. It is one of the beauties and advantages of literature,
that it is the means of abstracting the mind from the narrowness of
local and personal prejudices, and of enabling us to judge of truth
and excellence by their inherent merits alone. Woe be to the pen that
would undo this fine illusion (the only reality), and teach us to
regulate our notions of genius and virtue by the circumstances in
which they happen to be placed! You would not expect a person whom you
saw in a servants' hall, or behind a counter, to write Clarissa; but
after he had written the work, to _pre-judge_ it from the situation of
the writer, is an unpardonable piece of injustice and folly. His merit
could only be the greater from the contrast. If literature is an
elegant accomplishment, which none but persons of birth and fashion
should be allowed to excel in, or to exercise with advantage to the
public, let them by all means take upon them the task of enlightening
and refining mankind: if they decline this responsibility as too heavy
for their shoulders, let those who do the drudgery in their stead,
however inadequately, for want of their polite example, receive the
meed that is their due, and not to be treated as low pretenders who
have encroached on the province of their betters. Suppose Richardson
to have been acquainted with the great man's steward, or valet,
instead of the great man himself, I will venture to say that there was
more difference between him who lived in an _ideal world_, and had the
genius and felicity to open that world to others, and his friend the
steward, than between the lacquey and the mere lord, or between those
who lived in different rooms of the same house, who dined on the same
luxuries at different tables, who rode outside or inside of the same
coach, and were proud of wearing or of bestowing the same tawdry
livery. If the lord is distinguished from his valet by any thing else,
it is by education and talent, which he has in common with our author.
But if the latter shows these in the highest degree, it is asked what
are his pretensions? Not birth or fortune, for neither of these would
enable him to write a Clarissa. One man is born with a title and
estate, another with genius. That is sufficient; and we have no right
to question the genius for want of _gentility_, unless the former ran
in families, or could be bequeathed with a fortune, which is not the
case. Were it so, the flowers of literature, like jewels and
embroidery, would be confined to the fashionable circles; and there
would be no pretenders to taste or elegance but those whose names were
found in the court list. No one objects to Claude's Landscapes as the
work of a pastrycook, or withholds from Raphael the epithet of
_divine_, because his parents were not rich. This impertinence is
confined to men of letters; the evidence of the senses baffles the
envy and foppery of mankind. No quarter ought to be given to this
_aristocratic_ tone of criticism whenever it appears. People of
quality are not contented with carrying all the external advantages
for their own share, but would persuade you that all the intellectual
ones are packed up in the same bundle. Lord Byron was a later instance
of this double and unwarrantable style of pretension--_monstrum
ingens, biforme_. He could not endure a lord who was not a wit, nor a
poet who was not a lord. Nobody but himself answered to his own
standard of perfection. Mr. Moore carries a proxy in his pocket from
some noble persons to estimate literary merit by the same rule. Lady
Mary calls Fielding names, but she afterwards makes atonement by doing
justice to his frank, free, hearty nature, where she says "his spirits
gave him raptures with his cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was
starving in a garret, and his happy constitution made him forget every
thing when he was placed before a venison-pasty or over a flask of
champagne." She does not want shrewdness and spirit when her petulance
and conceit do not get the better of her, and she has done ample and
merited execution on Lord Bolingbroke. She is, however, very angry at
the freedoms taken with the Great; _smells a rat_ in this
indiscriminate scribbling, and the familiarity of writers with the
reading public; and inspired by her Turkish costume, foretells a
French or English revolution as the consequence of transferring the
patronage of letters from the _quality_ to the mob, and of supposing
that ordinary writers or readers can have any notions in common with
their superiors.]
The change, from the commencement to the close of life, appears like a
fable, after it has taken place; how should we treat it otherwise than
as a chimera before it has come to pass? There are some things that
happened so long ago, places or persons we have formerly seen, of
which such dim traces remain, we hardly know whether it was sleeping
or waking they occurred; they are like dreams within the dream of
life, a mist, a film before the eye of memory, which, as we try to
recall them more distinctly, elude our notice altogether. It is but
natural that the lone interval that we thus look back upon, should
have appeared long and endless in prospect. There are others so
distinct and fresh, they seem but of yesterday--their very vividness
might be deemed a pledge of their permanence. Then, however far back
our impressions may go, we find others still older (for our years are
multiplied in youth); descriptions of scenes that we had read, and
people before our time, Priam and the Trojan war; and even then,
Nestor was old and dwelt delighted on his youth, and spoke of the
race, of heroes that were no more;--what wonder that, seeing this long
line of being pictured in our minds, and reviving as it were in us, we
should give ourselves involuntary credit for an indeterminate period
of existence? In the Cathedral at Peterborough there is a monument to
Mary, Queen of Scots, at which I used to gaze when a boy, while the
events of the period, all that had happened since, passed in review
before me. If all this mass of feeling and imagination could be
crowded into a moment's compass, what might not the whole of life be
supposed to contain? We are heirs of the past; we count upon the
future as our natural reversion. Besides, there are some of our early
impressions so exquisitely tempered, it appears that they must always
last--nothing can add to or take away from their sweetness and
purity--the first breath of spring, the hyacinth dipped in the dew,
the mild lustre of the evening-star, the rainbow after a storm--while
we have the full enjoyment of these, we must be young; and what can
ever alter us in this respect? Truth, friendship, love, books, are
also proof against the canker of time; and while we live, but for
them, we can never grow old. We take out a new lease of existence from
the objects on which we set our affections, and become abstracted,
impassive, immortal in them. We cannot conceive how certain sentiments
should ever decay or grow cold in our breasts; and, consequently, to
maintain them in their first youthful glow and vigour, the flame of
life must continue to burn as bright as ever, or rather, they are the
fuel that feed the sacred lamp, that kindle "the purple light of
love," and spread a golden cloud around our heads! Again, we not only
flourish and survive in our affections (in which we will not listen to
the possibility of a change, any more than we foresee the wrinkles on
the brow of a mistress), but we have a farther guarantee against the
thoughts of death in our favourite studies and pursuits, and in their
continual advance. Art we know is long; life, we feel, should be so
too. We see no end of the difficulties we have to encounter:
perfection is slow of attainment, and we must have time to accomplish
it in. Rubens complained that when he had just learnt his art, he was
snatched away from it: we trust we shall be more fortunate! A wrinkle
in an old head takes whole days to finish it properly: but to catch
"the Raphael grace, the Guido air," no limit should be put to our
endeavours. What a prospect for the future! What a task we have
entered upon! and shall we be arrested in the middle of it? We do not
reckon our time thus employed lost, or our pains thrown away, or our
progress slow--we do not droop or grow tired, but "gain new vigour at
our endless task;"--and shall Time grudge us the opportunity to finish
what we have auspiciously begun, and have formed a sort of compact
with nature to achieve? The fame of the great names we look up to is
also imperishable; and shall not we, who contemplate it with such
intense yearnings, imbibe a portion of ethereal fire, the _divinae
particula aurae_, which nothing can extinguish? I remember to have
looked at a print of Rembrandt for hours together, without being
conscious of the flight of time, trying to resolve it into its
component parts, to connect its strong and sharp gradations, to learn
the secret of its reflected lights, and found neither satiety nor
pause in the prosecution of my studies. The print over which I was
poring would last long enough; why should the idea in my mind, which
was finer, more impalpable, perish before it? At this, I redoubled the
ardour of my pursuit, and by the very subtlety and refinement of my
inquiries, seemed to bespeak for them an exemption from corruption and
the rude grasp of Death.[41]
[Footnote 41: Is it not this that frequently keeps artists alive so
long, _viz._ the constant occupation of their minds with vivid images,
with little of the _wear-and-tear_ of the body?]
Objects, on our first acquaintance with them, have that singleness and
integrity of impression that it seems as if nothing could destroy or
obliterate them, so firmly are they stamped and rivetted on the brain.
We repose on them with a sort of voluptuous indolence, in full faith
and boundless confidence. We are absorbed in the present moment, or
return to the same point--idling away a great deal of time in youth,
thinking we have enough and to spare. There is often a local feeling
in the air, which is as fixed as if it were of marble; we loiter in
dim cloisters, losing ourselves in thought and in their glimmering
arches; a winding road before us seems as long as the journey of life,
and as full of events. Time and experience dissipate this illusion;
and by reducing them to detail, circumscribe the limits of our
expectations. It is only as the pageant of life passes by and the
masques turn their backs upon us, that we see through the deception,
or believe that the train will have an end. In many cases, the slow
progress and monotonous texture of our lives, before we mingle with
the world and are embroiled in its affairs, has a tendency to aid the
same feeling. We have a difficulty, when left to ourselves, and
without the resource of books or some more lively pursuit, to "beguile
the slow and creeping hours of time," and argue that if it moves on
always at this tedious snail's-pace, it can never come to an end. We
are willing to skip over certain portions of it that separate us from
favourite objects, that irritate ourselves at the unnecessary delay.
The young are prodigal of life from a superabundance of it; the old
are tenacious on the same score, because they have little left, and
cannot enjoy even what remains of it.
For my part, I set out in life with the French Revolution, and that
event had considerable influence on my early feelings, as on those of
others. Youth was then doubly such. It was the dawn of a new era, a
new impulse had been given to men's minds, and the sun of Liberty rose
upon the sun of Life in the same day, and both were proud to run their
race together. Little did I dream, while my first hopes and wishes
went hand in hand with those of the human race, that long before my
eyes should close, that dawn would be overcast, and set once more in
the night of despotism--"total eclipse!" Happy that I did not. I felt
for years, and during the best part of my existence, _heart-whole_ in
that cause, and triumphed in the triumphs over the enemies of man! At
that time, while the fairest aspirations of the human mind seemed
about to be realized, ere the image of man was defaced and his breast
mangled in scorn, philosophy took a higher, poetry could afford a
deeper range. At that time, to read the "Robbers," was indeed
delicious, and to hear
"From the dungeon of the tower time-rent,
That fearful voice, a famish'd father's cry,"
could be borne only amidst the fulness of hope, the crash of the fall
of the strongholds of power, and the exulting sounds of the march of
human freedom. What feelings the death-scene in Don Carlos sent into
the soul! In that headlong career of lofty enthusiasm, and the joyous
opening of the prospects of the world and our own, the thought of
death crossing it, smote doubly cold upon the mind; there was a
stifling sense of oppression and confinement, an impatience of our
present knowledge, a desire to grasp the whole of our existence in one
strong embrace, to sound the mystery of life and death, and in order
to put an end to the agony of doubt and dread, to burst through our
prison-house, and confront the King of Terrors in his grisly
palace!... As I was writing out this passage, my miniature-picture
when a child lay on the mantle-piece, and I took it out of the case to
look at it. I could perceive few traces of myself in it; but there was
the same placid brow, the dimpled mouth, the same timid, inquisitive
glance as ever. But its careless smile did not seem to reproach me
with having become a recreant to the sentiments that were then sown in
my mind, or with having written a sentence that could call up a blush
in this image of ingenuous youth!
"That time is past with all its giddy raptures." Since the future was
barred to my progress, I have turned for consolation to the past,
gathering up the fragments of my early recollections, and putting them
into a form that might live. It is thus, that when we find our
personal and substantial identity vanishing from us, we strive to gain
a reflected and substituted one in our thoughts: we do not like to
perish wholly, and wish to bequeath our names at least to posterity.
As long as we can keep alive our cherished thoughts and nearest
interests in the minds of others, we do not appear to have retired
altogether from the stage, we still occupy a place in the estimation
of mankind, exercise a powerful influence over them, and it is only
our bodies that are trampled into dust or dispersed to air. Our
darling speculations still find favour and encouragement, and we make
as good a figure in the eyes of our descendants, nay, perhaps, a
better than we did in our life-time. This is one point gained; the
demands of our self-love are so far satisfied. Besides, if by the
proofs of intellectual superiority we survive ourselves in this world,
by exemplary virtue or unblemished faith, we are taught to ensure an
interest in another and a higher state of being, and to anticipate at
the same time the applauses of men and angels.
"Even from the tomb the voice of nature cries;
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires."
As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time.
Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers
in this respect. We try to arrest its few last tottering steps, and to
make it linger on the brink of the grave. We can never leave off
wondering how that which has ever been should cease to be, and would
still live on, that we may wonder at our own shadow, and when "all the
life of life is flown," dwell on the retrospect of the past. This is
accompanied by a mechanical tenaciousness of whatever we possess, by a
distrust and a sense of fallacious hollowness in all we see. Instead
of the full, pulpy feeling of youth, everything is flat and insipid.
The world is a painted witch, that puts us off with false shows and
tempting appearances. The ease, the jocund gaiety, the unsuspecting
security of youth are fled: nor can we, without flying in the face of
common sense,
"From the last dregs of life, hope to receive
What its first sprightly runnings could not give."
If we can slip out of the world without notice or mischance, can
tamper with bodily infirmity, and frame our minds to the becoming
composure of _still-life_, before we sink into total insensibility, it
is as much as we ought to expect. We do not in the regular course of
nature die all at once: we have mouldered away gradually long before;
faculty after faculty, attachment after attachment, we are torn from
ourselves piece-meal while living; year after year takes something
from us; and death only consigns the last remnant of what we were to
the grave. The revulsion is not so great, and a quiet _euthanasia_ is
a winding-up of the plot, that is not out of reason or nature.
That we should thus in a manner outlive ourselves, and dwindle
imperceptibly into nothing, is not surprising, when even in our prime
the strongest impressions leave so little traces of themselves behind,
and the last object is driven out by the succeeding one. How little
effect is produced on us at any time by the books we have read, the
scenes we have witnessed, the sufferings we have gone through! Think
only of the variety of feelings we experience in reading an
interesting romance, or being present at a fine play--what beauty,
what sublimity, what soothing, what heart-rending emotions! You would
suppose these would last for ever, or at least subdue the mind to a
correspondent tone and harmony--while we turn over the page, while the
scene is passing before us, it seems as if nothing could ever after
shake our resolution, that "treason domestic, foreign levy, nothing
could touch us farther!" The first splash of mud we get, on entering
the street, the first pettifogging shop-keeper that cheats us out of
twopence, and the whole vanishes clean out of our remembrance, and we
become the idle prey of the most petty and annoying circumstances. The
mind soars by an effort to the grand and lofty: it is at home, in the
grovelling, the disagreeable, and the little. This happens in the
height and heyday of our existence, when novelty gives a stronger
impulse to the blood and takes a faster hold of the brain, (I have
known the impression on coming out of a gallery of pictures then last
half a day)--as we grow old, we become more feeble and querulous,
every object "reverbs its own hollowness," and both worlds are not
enough to satisfy the peevish importunity and extravagant presumption
of our desires! There are a few superior, happy beings, who are born
with a temper exempt from every trifling annoyance. This spirit sits
serene and smiling as in its native skies, and a divine harmony
(whether heard or not) plays around them. This is to be at peace.
Without this, it is in vain to fly into deserts, or to build a
hermitage on the top of rocks, if regret and ill-humour follow us
there: and with this, it is needless to make the experiment. The only
true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the
repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference
whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with
graceful resignation.
_Hazlitt._